Introduction to the Lecture: Over the past few decades, the global climate has undergone significant changes characterized primarily by warming, leading to a multitude of problems including more frequent and intense extreme weather and climate events, as well as rising sea levels. These changes have posed substantial threats to human health, ecological environments, and socio-economic stability, ranking among the most critical challenges faced globally. With a focus on two climate disasters that are significantly responsive to warming: humid heatwaves and sea level rise, this report introduces self-developed tools for measurement and projection, aiming to estimate their spatially heterogeneous characteristics under various greenhouse gas emission pathways. By quantifying the impacts of these changes on human society, the report identifies the risks associated with human-induced climate change and the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thereby highlighting the urgency of climate change mitigation.

Profile of the Speaker:

Yuan Jiacan is a Researcher and PhD Supervisor at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences/Institute of Atmospheric Sciences, Fudan University. She holds a PhD in Science from Peking University. From 2014 to 2018, she conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University and Rutgers University in the United States. From 2018 to 2019, she served as an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University before returning to Fudan University. Her primary research focuses on climate change, encompassing the response characteristics and mechanisms of extreme weather and climate events, sea level changes, and the economic impact assessment of climate change. Her research findings have been published in prestigious journals such as Environmental Research Letters, Nature, and The Quarterly Journal of Economics, with several papers ranked among the top 5% of high-impact papers by Altmetric. She is an author of The Lancet Countdown China Report on "Climate Change and Health," a member of the Working Group for the WCRP flagship project "Urban Environment and Regional Climate Change," an associate editor for the international SCI journals Urban Climate and Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, and a contributing author to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report Working Group I. She has received funding from the National High-level Talent Special Support Program for Youth and the Shanghai "Pujiang Talent" Program.